


To Hold and Be Held

by rainydayrambling



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 02:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3593145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainydayrambling/pseuds/rainydayrambling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan shows up at St. Agnes in the middle of the night and takes Adam for a drive in the rain.  Adam, meanwhile, considers this attraction that's been growing inside him lately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Hold and Be Held

Even before the bargain with Cabeswater, Adam liked to hold things in his hands. He didn’t know why. Maybe it let him subvert the suffering he felt at the hands of his father, or some sort of Gansey-like thing. Maybe it was just nice to know that things could be contained.

That was what had drawn him so tightly to Blue, at first anyway. Blue was a small person (a big personality, a big brain, a big soul, but physically, quite small). She fit gently into Adam’s hands.

Like car parts. Adam liked those too. Pens, the spiral binding of his Latin notebook, the solid heaviness of a textbook against his palms.

It was satisfying, holding things. He had never considered much what it might feel like to be held.

He hadn’t, anyway, until after Cabeswater, after he had promised his own hands away. After he had started to notice Ronan noticing him.

Adam was lying in bed, looking up at the occasional headlights trailing across his ceiling, mulling things over and considering letting those Cabeswater-bargained hands of his wander, when one set of headlights trailed halfway across the ceiling before stopping and shutting off.

He waited in the dark for the inevitable.

He listened for the steps and heard them, heavy and worn and, if he was being honest with himself, familiar, comfortable, and welcome.

“I was just about to get some sleep,” he said when Ronan, having used the spare key hidden in a gap in the wall of the hallway, appeared in the room.

“Why don’t I believe that?” Ronan said.

Adam shrugged, a gesture that was lost in the blankets and sheets surrounding him.

Ronan entered the room with little regard for the fact that Adam hadn’t technically invited him in, but sat down on the floor beside Adam’s mattress rather than on it. He was always careful to invade Adam’s space only as much as he knew absolutely for sure that he was allowed. Lately Adam had taken to wishing that he would lose some of those inhibitions.

It wasn’t fair to hope that Ronan would act. In fact, it was selfish. He knew how Ronan felt about him. Well, he knew that Ronan felt about him. He wasn’t sure of the extent. But he was beginning to know about a few feelings of his own and he wanted the waters tested.

He wanted to know what Ronan would feel like in his hands. He wanted to know what he would feel like in Ronan’s. He wanted a lot of things. He didn’t know what he wanted.

“Can I crash?” Ronan asked, as if the answer was ever no.

“Sure.”

Ronan reached behind the plastic crate Adam used as a bedside table to where he had stuffed his thin little mattress the last time he was here. He laid it out on the floor beside Adam’s bed, took a blanket away from Adam, and laid down.

Before he could stop the thought from coming, Adam wondered if the blanket was warm from having been draped over him a moment ago.

He didn’t know what was happening to him. It wasn’t as though he had never felt drawn to a boy before, and it was true that he had always admired and even at times enjoyed the sharp angles and smooth planes of Ronan’s face, the dark music of his voice, the defined edges and curves of his body. He had always known that Ronan Lynch was attractive. But recognizing him as attractive and being attracted to him were two very different things.

Adam lay still in his bed, and watched Ronan do the same. They were both on their backs, both tilted slightly toward each other. Neither were sleeping, nor making any move in that direction.

“Parrish,” Ronan said after a few minutes.

“Lynch.” Adam wondered if he was “Parrish” in Ronan’s thoughts, or if he was “Adam.” He wondered if Ronan thought of him at all.

“Still can’t sleep. Want to help me with something?”

Ronan’s hand was resting on top of the blanket he’d taken from Adam’s bed, his fingers curled around the edge of it, like he’d been ready this whole time to throw it aside.

“Yeah,” Adam said, fully aware that he was agreeing to something without knowing what it was, and knowing that it wouldn’t matter if he did. Somewhere along the line, long before any of this -- the nights at St. Agnes, before St. Agnes at all, when he was still living in his parents’ trailer, even before Blue had come along, really -- Adam had started doing anything Ronan asked of him.

Ronan got up but left his little mattress (more a pad than a mattress, really, but Ronan never seemed to mind) behind. Adam hoped this meant that Ronan planned to return, but pushed the thought aside. Adam stood up from his own bed, picked up a t-shirt off the floor and pulled it down over his head. He tried not to feel Ronan’s eyes following his movement.

Adam followed Ronan out to his car. Since Ronan had arrived at St. Agnes, it had started to rain, just gently, and the sound of it against the windows of the car was somehow thrilling even as it was peaceful. It felt like the rain was there to wash the world, make it clean and new again.

“Where are we going?” Adam finally asked when Ronan started the car and pulled away from the church.

Ronan just shot him a grin and didn’t answer, which Adam suspected meant that he didn’t know either. And Adam didn’t mind because he was a little bit transfixed by the way Ronan’s hands looked on the steering wheel.

It figured, Adam thought as they drove through the rain in the middle of the night, that he would be so drawn to Ronan, the boy with the dangerous smile, creator of beautiful things. It figured that he would find himself wanting this one thing that he could never allow himself to touch.

Because Ronan wanted him too, there was little question about that. As he drove, he took his eyes away from the road every few seconds, just to glance at Adam. He held his shoulders tense and tight, but his jaw was loose, lips parted, and every once in a while, he would even smile a little before forcing his mouth back to a neutral expression, as though he didn’t want Adam to know how happy it made him just to be here, sharing the space of the car when they should have both been sleeping.

“We’re not going anywhere, are we?” Adam said after a while, just to break himself away from his own thoughts.

“Nope,” Ronan said, allowing himself to show some of his joy, probably because he thought Adam would interpret it as infuriating mischief and disregard for others, but Adam was a little too far gone, and knew Ronan a little too well now, for that.

“You just couldn’t sleep and wanted me to come with you.”

Ronan glanced at him again, quickly, a little nervous now.

“Because you’re an asshole,” Adam added, and Ronan visibly relaxed, more or less confirming all of Adam’s fears. Ronan may have desired him, to some degree, and maybe would go along with whatever Adam wanted of him. But he was afraid of him too. Afraid of being hurt, afraid that Adam would hurt him.

Ronan pulled to a screeching halt suddenly and Adam realized that he hadn’t had any idea how fast they’d been going.

Before he asked what they were doing now, Ronan got out of the car and ran out into the rain. He held his arms out and looked up at the sky, looking like a weirdly ecstatic Christ. “Come on, Parrish,” he yelled, to be heard through the windows and the rain that was coming down now harder than ever.

Adam laughed and shook his head, but he got out of the car anyway. What would his life be, without Ronan’s antics? If he didn’t get scraped up from moving dollies and let Ronan push him through a parking lot in a shopping cart, or drag him out of bed in the middle of the night to speed through the pouring rain, Adam would only be Gansey’s poor friend, Blue’s angry ex, his father’s battered disappointment. He ran out to join him.

For a while they just played. They raced to various points in the fields that they pointed out to each other. Eventually, the ground was so soft that they couldn’t run without slipping and falling. At that point, Ronan scooped up a handful of mud and threw it so it hit Adam square in the back. Adam, of course, had to retaliate, and they ended up having a full-on mud war until Ronan slipped, grabbing Adam as he fell and, exhausted, neither of them got up again.

Instead, they lay side-by-side on the ground, letting the rain wash the mud off their faces.

“Do you believe in baptism?” Adam asked, a little bit just to say something and a little bit because he felt like he could say anything if they were lying in the mud getting rained on.

“I’m Catholic,” was all Ronan said in response.

“Right,” Adam said, and laughed a little at himself. He turned his head so he could see Ronan and it struck him that anyone watching this scene would see Ronan as the dark one, with his angles and his anger, his sharpness. But really, as tortured as he was, Ronan wasn’t like that at all. He was so full of light and love and goodness that it was almost hard to look at him sometimes.

Adam on the other hand was by all appearances utterly unassuming, and yet he couldn’t help but wonder that if it weren’t for Cabeswater he might be consumed by the darkness that was in him. He could feel it, pits and wells of shadow inside.

Ronan turned then too, and their eyes met. The moment was a heavy one, and Adam could feel his own power in it. Ronan wouldn’t do anything, he knew. But Adam could. Adam could lean in now and touch and kiss and probably do anything. Ronan would let him, as long as it wasn’t a lie (and it wouldn’t be, it really wouldn’t).

These hands of his had the power to change things. They could fix the ley lines. They could lash out as his father had done. They could draw Ronan to him.

He turned away. “We should get back,” he said. “School tomorrow.”

Ronan stood without saying anything, accepting that Adam was finished and that it was time to go home. They stood in the rain for a few more minutes, to let it wash away as much of the mud as possible. Adam wished it could clean his insides too.

The drive back didn’t seem as long as the drive out had, and before long they’d arrived back in the St. Agnes parking lot. Adam felt a giddy little roll of his stomach when Ronan got out of the car with him and they went back up to his apartment together.

Adam tossed Ronan a change of clothes and they both got out of their muddy things with a mix of shy reserve and a lack of self-consciousness that two people were bound to have when they spent more time together than they did with anyone else. Somewhere along the line, that had become the case.

This time when they got into their separate beds, Ronan fell asleep quickly. Adam let himself glance over a few times before he eventually drifted off, thinking not for the first time about what it might feel like to really be worthy, to hold and be held by something as fragile and sweet and tender as Ronan Lynch.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic wasn't happening and wasn't happening and then all of a sudden it got entirely away from me. I wasn't to focus a little more this time on Adam's actual attraction to Ronan, and how the weird brand of self-loathing he has would affect it. I've only just finished writing it, read through it once, so I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one, but it ended up being a lot of fun to write, mostly because I really love Adam Parrish a whole lot (as always, writing Ronan, and an accurate portrayal of him, was incredibly difficult and I'm not at all sure I got it right). I would be absolutely thrilled to hear what anyone thinks!


End file.
